CATS, established in 1978, promotes the statistical sciences, statistical education, statistics applications, and related issues affecting the statistics community. The mission and scope of CATS evolved over time as interdisciplinary collaboration increasingly shaped the character of scientific research. After a brief hiatus, CATS was reconstituted in 2011 and has since focused on improving the visibility and practice of statistics within government agencies not well connected to statistics, increasing attention to statistical issues of big data and data science, and helping agencies identify bottlenecks impairing their analysis capabilities. Its multidisciplinary members are experts from statistics and related fields and leaders in diverse areas of interdisciplinary research, including the analysis of large-scale data, computational biology and bioinformatics, spatial data, environmental science, neuroscience, health care policy, and complex computer experiments.
